THE Irish show world has lost one of its most distinctive voices and brilliant minds with the recent loss, following a short illness, of Liam Meade.

Born in 1940, Liam was, as he said himself, a “war baby” and divided his childhood summers between staying with relatives on their Ballinacurra farm and helping his father Patrick, the Limerick Show Society secretary, with preparations for the annual show. All this, plus his memories of watching mares, replaced by tractors on Irish farms, being loaded at the Limerick docks bound for English factories, formed his lifelong interest in horses, agricultural shows and preserving traditional bloodlines.